The arguments made by AI safety researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies are superficially appealing but fatally flawed, says Jacob Aron
Yeah, maybe, all those things could be necessary for sure. It’s possible that our brains aren’t the exact most optimal way of structuring such a thing, and it’s not guaranteed that the best way to replicate it is to stimulate it. It’s also plausible that there are calculations which capture a good deal of the complexity of the relative positions of neurons in simpler terms. Maybe there are way more complications than that. Maybe some of them work against each other in our brains and it would be better to leave them out of a simulation. There are many orders of magnitudes of unknowns. But it seems really likely that it’s at least as complicated as what the earlier poster described. And I think that’s quite a strong position already for most practical arguments about it.
Yeah, maybe, all those things could be necessary for sure. It’s possible that our brains aren’t the exact most optimal way of structuring such a thing, and it’s not guaranteed that the best way to replicate it is to stimulate it. It’s also plausible that there are calculations which capture a good deal of the complexity of the relative positions of neurons in simpler terms. Maybe there are way more complications than that. Maybe some of them work against each other in our brains and it would be better to leave them out of a simulation. There are many orders of magnitudes of unknowns. But it seems really likely that it’s at least as complicated as what the earlier poster described. And I think that’s quite a strong position already for most practical arguments about it.